In 1639, New College was renamed Harvard College for clergyman John Harvard.

In 1781, the seventh planet of the solar system, Uranus, was discovered by Sir William Herschel.

In 1862, President Lincoln signed a measure prohibiting Union military officers from returning fugitive slaves to their owners.

In 1901, the 23d President of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, died in Indianapolis at age 67.

In 1925, the Tennessee General Assembly approved a bill prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution. (Governor Austin Peay signed the measure on March 21.)

In 1933, banks in the US began to reopen after a ‘‘holiday’’ declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In 1938, famed attorney Clarence S. Darrow died in Chicago.

In 1943, author-poet Stephen Vincent Benet, 44, died in New York. Financier and philanthropist J.P. Morgan Jr., 75, died in Boca Grande, Fla.

In 1964, bar manager Catherine ‘‘Kitty’’ Genovese, 28, was stabbed to death near her Queens, N.Y., home; the case generated controversy over the supposed failure of Genovese’s neighbors to respond to her cries for help.

In 1969, the Apollo 9 astronauts splashed down, ending a mission that included the successful testing of the Lunar Module.

In 1980, Ford Motor Chairman Henry Ford II announced he was stepping down, the same day a jury in Winamac, Ind., found the company not guilty of reckless homicide in the fiery deaths of three young women in a Ford Pinto.

In 1988, yielding to student protests, the board of trustees of Gallaudet University in Washington D.C., a liberal arts college for the hearing-impaired, chose I. King Jordan to become the school’s first deaf president.

In 1996, a gunman burst into an elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and opened fire, killing 16 children and one teacher before killing himself.

In 2003, forced into a diplomatic retreat, US officials said President George W. Bush might delay a vote on his troubled United Nations resolution or even drop it — and fight Iraq without the international body’s backing. The Senate voted 64-33 to ban a procedure that critics called partial birth abortion. (The measure passed the House and was signed into law by President Bush in November 2003.) Norwegian Robert Sorlie won the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race in nine days, 15 hours, 47 minutes.

In 2008, the body of Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was found in a shallow grave in northern Iraq, two weeks after he was kidnapped by gunmen in one of the most dramatic attacks against the country’s small Christian community.

In 2012, 22 students returning from a ski holiday and six adults died when their bus crashed inside a tunnel in southern Switzerland. A ferry carrying more than 200 people collided with a cargo boat and sank just short of Dhaka, Bangladesh.